A few of my favorite Medium stories and writers from 2015
For the last 5 years, a group of music loving friends and I have exchanged our year-end favorite albums lists with each other over email (this is not an uncommon thing). Throughout the year this email chain is peppered with heated debate and snarky banter about artists and their music. It’s always fun and always insightful. I struggled hard this year to create my year-end list. Probably because I listened to way less music in 2015 and read way more Medium.
Music is often enjoyed in communal settings that serve to enhance the experience (except when that woman kept jumping on my toes at a Modest Mouse show this year). At Medium, we think conversation and the communal exchange of ideas enhances content and makes us smarter. So here are a few stories and writers you may have missed who left and impact on me in 2015. I’d love to read your year-end list.
Dominique Matti is as sincere, and fervent, and honest as they come. Everything she writes is thoughtful and full of life. I wish everyone had the courage to be this vulnerable and true in their writing:
Holly Wood fuses political satire with deft insights better than most. She is one of the few writers who elicit true excitement each time I get a notification through the Medium app that she just published. Sometimes poignant. Often profane. Always perceptive and profound. I read this piece waiting for a delayed flight to SF and had to sit for five hours in the middle seat of jealousy wishing I could write like her:
Lunch with Jon Ward and Jack Gerard a few months ago, heightened the framing to some lingering questions that I have not been able to stop thinking about since: How are social networks and digital media shaping the our politics, for better and worse? What role can/should/will Medium play in it all? I think you will struggle to find someone better at weaving two complex narratives, and all their connotations, as well as Jon does with this piece on Jeb(!) and Marco:
Along those same lines, John Herrman’s unflinching swan dive into this “You Tell Me” was the most important conversation that happened on Medium this year, IMHO. John’s insights on the future and ramifications of a tech+media matrimony, have become foundational to how I think about these things:
Are you familiar with the website This.? It’s great. The platform restricts your ability to share content to once a day. If there was a This. that restricted users to one share a year, I would probably share this story from Jason Smith. It’s that good. It is rare that you can read a story from someone else’s life and walk around months later with imagery in your head just as vivid as if they were your own life experiences:
Brittany Packnett is from St. Louis. Her first-person account and personal narrative surrounding the Mike Brown killing in Ferguson, and subsequent protest movement, is a must read. If I had a list of people I wish blogged more regularly, Brittany would make my top 5:
I love commencement speech season and once upon a time I wanted to join the Foreign Service. Ambassador Samantha Power’s commencement makes me wish I had pursued that career path with a little more zeal:
I’d been following Sam Grittner on Twitter for a while before I realized he was on Medium. He’s a funny dude. This story is funny. And heart wrenching. And wonderfully pure:
In my job, I spend a great deal of time helping members of Congress, their staff, political thought leaders, and DC institutions figure out how they can best use Medium. There is certainly no magic formula or blueprint, and not everything needs to be this earnest, but Senator Chris Murphy and Senator Mike Lee offer two really good examples below. It’s quite refreshing to engaged with a politician and feel like your perspective on something was significantly sharpened and you learned something useful:
Pete Souza is a master. These photographs are wonderful. Michigan for the win:
Here are four publications you should follow on Medium.
AMPLIFY is a publication full of stories from fellows in the Global Health Corps — just some of the smartest and most motivated recent college grads thrown into into developing countries and asked to help work on really important global challenges. You can hear from Chad Ku’uipo Noble-Tabiolo what it is like to be “Gay in the Warm Heart of Africa”, or from Joanna Nganda on the “Language and the Legitimacy of Being a Woman in Burundi”.
THOSE PEOPLE might be the most important publication on Medium. Joel Leon.’s, “My Best Friend is White” and John Lee Fisher’s, “The Worst Case of Voter Suppression That I Have Ever Seen”, were standouts for me in 2015.
There are some really smart people and amazing story tellers who work for the State Department. That should shock no one. I’m glad they started this publication in 2015 so I could read things like “Fighting Global Drug Addiction”.
We spun up Soapbox DC as a place for insiders in our nation’s capital to ruminate on the discussions dominating our politics. Give us a follow. Better yet, write something chock-full of smart takes. Keep the hot takes to yourself.
